Michael Wood is an emeritus professor at Princeton. He has written books on Yeats, Nabokov, Stendhal, Hitchcock and Empson, among other things.
Dino Buzzati’s novel The Singularity was published in Italian in 1960 but set in 1972. Just a small leap into the future, but far enough for the second date to be that of Buzzati’s death. A coincidence, of course, but one that hints at meaning or design, as coincidences often do. We could say that life, for once, was mildly imitating his fiction, visiting his world of weirdly...
Edward Ashton’s novel Mickey7 (2022) has an opening line that’s hard to beat: ‘This is gonna be my stupidest death ever.’ The speaker is lying in an ice-encrusted cave which he fell into as he walked through a rocky landscape. But what about his other deaths? Bong Joon-ho doesn’t quite match this announcement in Mickey 17, his dizzying movie version of the...
The opening of Walter Salles’s haunting new film, I’m Still Here, places us a long way from its later concerns. The shots and action look like an energetic advertisement for Rio de Janeiro as a holiday destination, all beaches and volleyball and laughing children. When we move to a garden, the famous statue of Christ hangs like a blessing high in the air.
There are breaks in this...
Everything talks in Brady Corbet’s films, especially the scenes and objects that are silent. A snowy Italian mountain face seems to be some sort of fable, the Statue of Liberty appears upside down in an empty sky, the world spins at the end of a French motorcade as if it had gone crazy. Corbet likes to shoot cars at night, where we see mainly a dark screen, and just a few moving...
Edward Berger’s Conclave looks rather stately at first, a matter of grand buildings, Michelangelo murals and a simple question: the pope is dead; who will succeed him? But this impression doesn’t last long. Roman buildings start to whisper their histories, murals are spectacular but often threatening, and the question is not so much who as how. Robert Harris’s novel of the...
Michael Wood talks to Malin Hay about the recent list from Sight and Sound of the ‘greatest films of all time’ (in which he voted), and what considerations could, or should, go into compiling such...
Michael Wood talks to Adam Shatz about critical theory, its origins, developments and various diversions, and where it stands today.
Michael Wood looks at how Fritz Lang uses sound in his first two sound films, M (1931) and The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1933).
Michael Wood reads his take on Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra.
On the face of it a Dictionary of Untranslatables looks like a contradiction in terms, either self-imploding from the word go, or, if pursued, headed fast down a cul-de-sac in which it is...
It took a very special kind of invention to get an awareness of the ‘erratic truth of death’s timing’ into a medium of mass entertainment.
I don’t believe in astrology, but I also know that not believing in astrology is a typically Taurean trait. When I first caught a bright young friend browsing in the astrology section of a...
Above the entrance to the saloon bar there is a picture of Shakespeare on the swinging sign. It is the same picture of Shakespeare that I remember from my schooldays, when I frowned over Timon of...
Musing over Don Juan, Byron asked his banker and agent Douglas Kinnaird a rhetorical question: ‘Could any man have written it – who has not lived in the world? – and tooled in a...
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